Success Story: Thousand Hills Ranch

Located in Morden, Manitoba, a two-hour drive from Winnipeg, Thousand Hills Ranch is a family farm producing grass-fed beef and lamb. Thousand Hills Ranch works alongside their animals using holistic and regenerative farming practices to replenish their land and produce the best quality product.

Dean, a life long farmer, and Tiina, a city gal, married in 2007, after which they established the name Thousand Hills Ranch and began to direct market grass-fed beef in their community, eventually adding grass-fed lamb, wool, and body care products.

The Broken Record

Initially, like everyone, Tiina was promoting her products at farmers’ markets and taking orders through phone calls and emails. As their inventory increased, so did their orders, and Tiina found herself struggling to communicate effectively with customers.

Sharing photos and product information on Facebook was ok, but it was only working for those customers actively visiting their page. Tiina still didn’t have a good way to uniformly communicate with all their customers to share information, updates, and exciting news. As a result, when it came to generating new business, Tiina was ALWAYS pitching. Some days she felt like a broken record repeating her pitch multiple different times to customers asking the same things.

Killing 2 Birds with 1 Stone

Meanwhile, Thousand Hills Ranch and a small group of local producers were running a food buying club with the use of an online survey order form. The group wanted to expand their reach and remove the ‘exclusiveness’ associated with a buying club. One of the other farmers in the club recommended Local Line, so Thousand Hills Ranch decided to come check us out! Ultimately, Tiina decided to use Local Line for both the online food market and their own orders.

Since starting with Local Line in September 2018, Local Line has saved Tiina hours each week on communicating with their customers. She loves their online store as it does the selling for her. Images, product descriptions, and product categories enable new buyers to take a look at what’s available without Tiina having to constantly repeat herself. On top of that, the real time inventory updates and automated order reminder emails takes the work out of manually communicating updates to products and inventory.

“The biggest benefit I found by using Local Line was how easy it is now to communicate! Updating and communicating changes to our inventory has become effortless. Furthermore, when I want to promote Thousand Hills Ranch to new customers, I can just give them a link to our online store and they can explore for themselves!”

Looking back, Tiina can’t imagine a time when she was doing all her inventory and customer communications without Local Line. We’re so happy she found the system she needs! Make sure you go check out Thousand Hills Ranch by their online store!